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Where To Draw the Line With Embryo Selection?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jun 27, 2008 06:56 PM
from the godwin-bonanza dept.
from the godwin-bonanza dept.
Tjeerd writes "There is currently a discussion going on in the Netherlands about embryo selection. The process means that when using in vitro fertilization, you can check what kind of genetic defects will definitely become activated during life. When embryos with those defects are identified, they can be avoided or destroyed. The next step the government is considering is to make it possible to select against genetic defects which might become active in life, such as breast and colon cancer. Of course, this is a very difficult discussion; where do you start, and where do you end? People are worrying that there is no real limit, and that you could potentially check for every genetic defect. I think if you're in a situation where you or your family have genetic defects, you surely want to check whether your children would have them too. What does the Slashdot community think about this?"
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Government should not be involved at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I am not Christian, and certainly not Catholic. I have no concern, or consideration for a clump of cells.
Furthermore, I have a Penis. According to all the junkmail I get, it is a humiliatingly small penis that all the women laugh at hysterically, but the point is that I am a Man.
I don't think men should have any business telling a women what to do with their bodies, certainly not based on faith either.
That being said, if you could choose the genetic make-up of your children and spare them any diseases or malformations I would be hard pressed to form an argument against it. Especially, since I would want the same for my children.
So I understandably have a hard time agreeing that government could declare a position either way on this. They should just be silent and mind their own business.
Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone not involved should mind their own business? I agree with that. Government religion you listening? Hey! Religion, get your ass back here! Don't you walk away!!
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone not involved should mind their own business? I agree with that. Government religion you listening? Hey! Religion, get your ass back here! Don't you walk away!!
So, if a cop sees someone beating the shit out of you, should he mind his own business? Wait, before you answer, that cop is part of the government and is "not involved" in your ass getting kicked. Should he mind his own business. Of course not! Why? Because it's the governments job to protect its innocent citizens, and therefor not only has the right, but the DUTY to step in. That's a given. The unborn are also innocent. That's also a given. Now the question we need to be asking in this situation is not, "should the government do anything" but "when is human life human?"
Now, the GP stated that he couldn't give a shit about a clump a cells. Well, isn't he just a clump of cells? If his mother decided to have an abortion at this stage and started chasing him with a vacuum cleaner, should the police (or CPS) turn a blind eye? After all, he is just a clump of cells.
So, whether or not government should protect you is not a matter of religion. When is human life HUMAN is where religion steps in.
IMHO, if a DNA test says its human, then it's human and religion has nothing to do with it. No one should be allowed to kill or experiment on him/her without his/her permission.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind here we are talking about in vitro fertilization. In that process it is typical to create several fertilized eggs and implant one. The reset are disposed of. That being the case, why does it matter if genetic tests are used to determine which fertilized egg should be implanted? I don't see any moral dilemma here.
As an aside it is so absolutely ridiculous to give everything with human DNA the same rights as a full human that it isn't even worth discussing. If you can't see the folly of giving a lost tooth the same rights as a child you are beyond reason.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should we try to save human life anyway? I say we should protect people instead. If I were to go braindead because of some accident, I wouldn't mind if they 'pulled the plug', even though doing so would mean they killed a 'human life'. A body without a mind is just a bag of meat, regardless of what species it belongs to. Note that this does not apply to someone who is in a coma, since they might still wake up, so the mind is still 'in there'. Of course when there is reason to believe that a person in a coma is never going to wake up you should still consider killing that person.
Anyway since embryos haven't really got a mind yet I don't really see a problem in killing them. Sure, doing so prevents a potential person, but so do contraceptives.
> IMHO, if a DNA test says its human, then it's human and religion has nothing to do with it. No one should be allowed to kill or experiment on him/her without his/her permission.
That is ridiculous. People drop cells all the time, and some of those cells will still be alive. Those cells should not have any rights (but the person still has rights, so you probably shouldn't DNA-test any cell you find without the owner's permission).
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say that instead of someone beating the shit out of me, they're coming at me with a knife -- except that they're a surgeon performing a medical procedure I opted into. Is it still the police officer's job to "protect" me from something I'm doing by choice?
Of course not. But then, embryos certainly don't opt into the euphemistic "medical procedure" being performed upon them.
So it should be illegal for me to get a tumor cut out of me -- because a DNA test would show that it's human?
A tumor is a piece of a human, not a complete one- cut yours out, you live on, the rest of your cells surviving the loss.
An embryo, on the other hand, is the entire entity. Kill it, and an individual dies.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's another case: A woman who with a serious medical condition becomes pregnant. She cannot survive to bring the child to term, and the child will not survive. Can an abortion be performed then? Saving one life instead of killing both of them?
Also, keep in mind, especially in the second case, it is rarely a 100% certainty. There is always a small chance that both will live. Would you require that a woman with a 1% chance of surviving take that chance? Why is that your decision to make? Why is that anyone's choice but her own?
How about all of the embryos that for one reason or another are destroyed by the body itself? Should we be trying to protect those as well? Should we spend money on protecting the "unborn" instead of say, cancer research?
Those embryos are just as much "potential individuals" as all of the children that don't exist because not every fertile human is continually having sex.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the various form of twinning that occur, which in rare cases leads to one twin actually becoming part of the other, and needing to be removed so that the fully grown twin can live? That other twin (which cannot survive in any scenario) is human, and it is its own entity
There are two entirely different scenarios being posed. In the situation above, you state that there are two human lives at risk - how do you balance between them. It's the same as saying "You're wife and child are dangling from different cliffs. Both could fall at any moment. You have time to save one - which do you choose?" It's a moral dilemma, a no-win situation - whichever way you choose, a human dies, and your choice will be based upon this knowledge.
This is entirely different to "There is one human life, and a bunch of cells. We can do whatever we like to the bunch of cells, because we don't define it as human". In this case, there is no weighing of the life of the embryo, no moral decision - it's considered junk, and treated like it.
At the risk of sounding flamebait-y, this is the same proposition raised during the time when black slavery was acceptable. If you define "human" in such a way that it excludes blacks, then slavery isn't any more wrong than keeping hunting dogs. They're just animals after all. Whenever you start splitting hairs over what is and isn't human, you begin toeing a very fine line.
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Some people have more cells than others (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people have more cells than others. I don't think it's fair to try to define how human someone is by the number of cells they have.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
How about all of the embryos that for one reason or another are destroyed by the body itself?
There's a big difference between natural and unnatural death. What you're saying is like comparing death by murder and death by old age because they both have the same end result.
Those embryos are just as much "potential individuals" as all of the children that don't exist because not every fertile human is continually having sex.
So not creating is the equivalent of destroying? Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
I get really sick of your types trying to confuse the ethics in the debate. You know perfectly well that questions where illness, injury, and severe but natural birth defects like the twinning you mentioned are envolved pose a different set of ethical questions. Its not needed or even rational to try and address those in the same fasion we do healthy mothers with healy embros/fetuses.
Try these ethics questions out to get my point:
1. Your are resuce worker you see a person who has slipped an fallen. They are unconscience and not breathing, they won't survive unless you help them, and might not survie if you do. You are trainned in CPR. Should attempt to help this person?
--->Of course you would, there is no delima here.
2. Your are resuce worker you see a person who has slipped an fallen while trying to escape a buring building. They are unconscience and not breathing, they won't survive unless you help them, and might not survie if you do. You are trainned in CPR. You also recongize the situation is still very dangerous and entering would put you at risk. Should attempt to help this person?
--->Much more complication here, Before we answer we need to look at some things not unlike your mom might not survive carring the child question, and your birth defects question.
How dangerous is it really for you?
How likely is that you could save the person?
The right thing as to wether or not you attempt a rescue is going to revolve around those questions. Its a different problem then the first.
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Re:Spontaneous abortion (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say that the right to life is more fundamental than the right to be irresponsible (if you aren't alive all of your other rights are meaningless). You can always chose adoption. I know it might be inconvenient, but I don't think that's a good reason kill someone.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
An embryo is not a complete human, remove it like the tumor and it will die, just like the tumor.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Informative)
Does a tumor have a beating heart or brain activity?
An embryo does within 6 weeks.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
So does that cockroach I just fed to my cat. What's your point?
If it were as easy as saying that entities with a heartbeat and brain activity are human and deserving of protection, this whole debate wouldn't even happen.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say that instead of someone beating the shit out of me, they're coming at me with a knife -- except that they're a surgeon performing a medical procedure I opted into. Is it still the police officer's job to "protect" me from something I'm doing by choice?
The problem is that the cop is not "protecting you", but the human inside you.
So it should be illegal for me to get a tumor cut out of me -- because a DNA test would show that it's human?
Nope. The DNA test shows that it's a HUMAN TUMOR. A biologist clearly knows the difference between a differenced human cell, a stem cell, a cancerous cell, and a human embryo.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, stuff only happens that way in sensationalist hollywood movies your culture spoon-feeds you from birth.
One aspect of a field of science gets blown the fuck out of proportion, applied to an entire global society (all previous traces of the people who were there before is wiped clean), with the assumption that nobody in that global society was smart enough to call for
[a] Rationalization
[b] Considerations of consequences, dangers, pros, cons and a learned debate on whether said overblown scientific discovery/field/whatever should proceed unrestricted, be carefully regulated (never happens in movies, nearly the only way it happens in The Real World(tm)), or, heaven forbit, not happen at all.
[c] People are way too stupid to so much as forsee the problem, less so propose solutions to it.
In reality, people DO think about this. Scientists, thinkers, corporations, governments DO pay smart people to voice opinions about these things. Yes, every so often one first-world country will ignore thought-through process in a specific field, but that'd be one country, in one field. If the enire government goes to hell - then it is no longer a first-world country. Other countries will take its place. By large, it's transient issues. Most issues get handled in a reasonably smart manner, even in the US.
These thinkers also communicate with each other, publish and voice these concerns. The interweb thingie.. you may have heard about it.
Global population is big enough to allow the law of large numbers largely take care of major oversights.
In reality, if a gene is lost, then it will be lost. Big whoop. You've lost quite a few since you formed a close endosymbiotic relationship with mitochondria. By the time it happens, more than likely we'll be able to put it back too.
More to the point, if you're envisioning a world where ALL the humans come from a single genetic selection, where natural procreation does not happen in a single country in the world anymore, where EVERY ONE of the current 6+ billion person offspring comes from one centrally-selected vial and all human biodiversity has automagically been somehow eliminated, you're not contributing to the debate at hand, just to the general vibe of ignorant sensationalist idiocy coming out of Hollywood.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, if you could choose the genetic make-up of your children and spare them any diseases or malformations I would be hard pressed to form an argument against it. Especially, since I would want the same for my children.
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
In short, Beethoven. ;)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. My first thought was not to touch your post with a 10 foot pole. I have a birth defect as well and I don't believe that life starts at conception. In any case, I am not the woman either.
If your mother could have chosen a different embryo other than yours, or repaired yours, would you of wanted that for her?
Tough questions, I know. My own sister missed an abortion by -> - much. I cannot imagine life without her.
I would never take anything away from disabled people. Ever. They have made tremendous contributions to society.
EVEN still, I would say that we don't have the rights to tell parents that they must have children with known defects, especially when there is a technical solution proven to work.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously not, since "you" wouldn't be wanting anything. The counterfactual always hopelessly muddles questions of identity.
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Reality show (Score:5, Funny)
I'd love to see 'Survivor : Petri Dish', where the embryos have to compete in stupid tasks, win immunity, and survive elimination for the right to be born.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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logical fallacies (Score:5, Insightful)
''What if you were aborted because you have a "defect"? That would have sucked huh?''
That question can't be answered because it rests on a logical fallacy.
If you were aborted, you would never have existed. If you never existed, you would never have been in a position to contemplate the question.
The question plays on emotions of those who are already alive, people who have lived some life already - be it geriatrics with full lives, middle-aged, the young, kids or even newborns / their family.
This is about IVF embryo selection. A selection is already made. As we cannot foretell the lives that any child will lead, any question of "well what if this embryo that is certain to die of young age is the next Einstein!?" becomes moot as you could ask the very same question of the embryo in the 'next tube over' determined to -not- have the same disorder.
Once you realize that, then making the choice between the two is easy. Making the choice to make that choice in the first place may remain the hard part, for some.
Of course, given the choice and not taking the choice, then 16 years down the road realizing that, yep, your kid's dead because indeed he was certain to die at young age, might make you ponder not having made that choice. Or you could just accept that that's how life goes and be thankful for the 16 years you did have with the kid.
Similarly, let's say the 'healthy' one was chosen and turns out it ends up stillborn. You might wonder about the choice you made there, then, as well.
That's the fun thing about all of this - they're highly personal decisions and everybody has to live with that decision either which way.
That's also where government regulation comes into play, imho. If everything becomes a choice then this puts undue stress on the (hopeful) parents-to-be. That's also in part why the Dutch government currently is going with a case-by-case scenario - so selecting by "blue eyes, blonde hair" as some proposed is right out. Life-threatening disorders, predispositions, etc. are the bits being looked at - on a case-by-case scenario. I say in part, because the other part is just plainly the conservative religious party going "zomg! playing god!!!" and threatening to let the government collapse over the issue if they didn't get their way. (They're a minority party but together with two bigger parties just barely make the ruling majority; so if they go, the entire thing goes.)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Interesting)
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
I wonder what the reaction would be like to a couple deliberately wanting to have a "disabled" child. For example, if a blind couple also wanted to have a blind child.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Informative)
How so? Beethoven's deafness had an adult onset, and it's now believed to have been due to lead poisoning, not a genetic cause. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have a genetic propensity to heavy metal poisoning. Although some people may be more sensitive than others, I wouldn't call it a genetic disorder.
Now if you had talked about Edison's or A.G. Bell's dyslexia, you might have had a better point. But even so, dyslexia's a disability that, properly diagnosed, can be worked around. Still it does raise a good point which is, what positive traits with disability co-factors might we eliminate if we try to eliminate disabilities. The best example of that is how the genetic traits for thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia also provide limited protection against malaria [harvard.edu]
"Malaria's not a problem for me, I live and have evolved for northern latitude where the mosquitoes and malaria are less prevalent", you might say. Ah, but what happens when you get something like Global Warming combined with air travel increasing the territory for malaria? Could genetic defect selection be wiping out currently unnecessary gene variations that could prove critical in another few hundred years?
As usual, SF touched on some of these issues already decades ago, starting with a Heinlein novella called "Beyond this Horizon".
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, if you could choose the genetic make-up of your children and spare them any diseases or malformations I would be hard pressed to form an argument against it. Especially, since I would want the same for my children.
Genetic diversity.
Perhaps the only people who will survive the next great plague are the ones who do not have blue eyes nor blond hair.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Would I have been your kid?
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, how do you prevent people picking a child simply based on arbitrary cosmetic reasons? "You're going to have a daughter, but her breasts will develop entirely lopsided" Really? Crap, ditch that one, let's try another.
The situation is worse combined with what I mentioned in another thread... we're all guaranteed to develop a genetic defect that will express itself as us being unable to generate vitamin C... if I didn't like some odd element of my prospective child (say, "he doesn't have blue eyes and blond hair") then I could simply say, "it has a genetic defect, so I can ditch this one, and try again."
Basically, the question is, how much should we play the role of natural selection? Some mutations have a more or less neutral effect upon humans, or even a negative effect upon us, however that negative effect has a positive effect in other cases, and results in an overall increase.
The issue here is, we shouldn't be able to start mandating genetic purity, and we should only be able to dismiss a child for reasons that would cause a medical illness requiring treatment... not simply "they don't match what I want."
What you "want" is to get away from natural selection and move towards some artificial selection, and while some of that is good (preventing down syndrome, and some other disorders) at the same time... we need to be careful what we throw away, or eliminate from the human genome by conscious choice.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think men should have any business telling a women what to do with their bodies, certainly not based on faith either.
You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who advocates telling people what to do with their bodies. You can, however, find those who would like to legislate a measure of protection for other people's bodies (even if those bodies happen to temporarily be inside other people's bodies).
That being said, this really is a whatcouldpossiblygowrong situation. Disease is one thing, but what about aesthetics? Should people have the right to select babies based on more or less meaningless preferences? And of course, what of the people who were not preselected? Will they be forced to live out the life of one considered inferior?
Of course, that's the moral playing God standpoint, there's also the scientific playing evolution standpoint. Do you really think that we can play with genetics and foresee all the consequences? This could be a great way to dig ourselves into an evolutionary hole. Take the commercial Cavendish banana, for instance. Bred to be the best, and it stands to be wiped out by a single disease. Yeah, that's clonal propagation, but even if it were sexual reproduction, anything that limits the genetic pool tends to be a bad thing. For example, dog breeds were genetically concentrated into smaller populations, and they're medical train wrecks compared to mutts.
So, moral issues aside, genetic selection might work for a few generations, but then I'd bet it begins to come unglued, and the benefits dissipate when a bunch of weird-assed disease start poping up in the selected populations.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Right... so what happens if being born female happens to be treated like a genetic defect in your country?
Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Right... so what happens if being born female happens to be treated like a genetic defect in your country?
You population dies out or moves away?
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Right... so what happens if being born female happens to be treated like a genetic defect in your country?
Well, as China is discovering, what happens is that you learn it is a BIG MISTAKE to remove girls from the population through sex selection, as the creation of embryos using two sperm, along with male pregnancy, have not yet been made viable options. Females are pretty much required to keep your country populated and functioning. You can get by with fewer males, but removing a large number of females from the population is essentially suicide for a culture/country.
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Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score:4, Interesting)
They may be overpopluated now, but they are heading for a very huge crash in the future if they don't do something about the cultural pressure to have a son (and using sex selection to get a boy). The One Child policy to control the population can work as long as you're not skewing your future generations to be disproportionately male. And not only are you losing the capacity to keep your population stable, you also end up with a lot of frustrated and angry young men who can't find a wife (a problem they are currently facing).
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A counter example (Score:3, Insightful)
A weakness is not always a weakness.
Consider the old example that gets trotted out, time and time again: sickle cell anaemia. In the US, Australia, England, Canada, etc., it's a weakness, and is rare. But in Africa, it turns out that if you have one normal gene acting in tandem with one sickle cell anaemia gene (remember that genes always operate in pairs), you are more resistant to the effects of malaria.
Two sickle cell genes, and you're in trouble. One, and if malaria is prevalent, you're actually better off (but if it's not, you're slightly worse off.)
So just because a given gene variant is a weakness here and now in our society doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing overall. We simply don't know enough to judge the bigger picture in the general case.
Re:A counter example (Score:5, Informative)
This technique could allow selecting for 1/2 sickle cell in Africa though, no longer will 25% of their children be SOL one way and another 25% SOL the other way.
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Go for it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go for it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except you're not. With the current technology you are selecting out embryos which carry single nucleotide polymorphisms [wikipedia.org] which are associated with certain deleterious traits. You are not selecting for "healthy", you are selecting for "not diseased" and not even that, just "less likelihood of being diseased" (likelihood depends on the specific trait).
The problem here is you don't really know what else you are selecting for or against. Again, in most cases, you aren't testing for the deleterious gene(s) itselft, you're using a proxy marker. Lots of unknowns here. I'm not sure I would be embracing this technology just yet.
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What constitutes 'weakness' or 'defect'? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the real issue, in my opinion where it is GROSSLY obvious that a defect will harm the child severely then we should. I really doubt our science (and scientists) are capable at present at deciding what is a 'defect' when no studies have been done and data is not available, since what one might consider a defect, may not be, or maybe tied to a whole host of other issues once development starts, after all if you're going to discard emybryos with percieved small 'defects', the error in judgement of what constitutes a defect is rather large.
If we coul we would monitor and control the growth and eliminate 'defects' during the whole term of a pregnancy or even as we grow throughout are life but this is just not feasable realistically, at some point an embryo is 'good enough', and I really don't think we have the knowledge at present to judge very accurately what constitutes a 'defect' at smaller levels without studies and long term data to back it up.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes I am replying to my own post, hit reply there before finishing. I mean that what one might consider 'smaller defects', are they really 'defects', how does one determine defect from being different? If one looks at how life evolves, we might consider many species today as a result of 'defects'.
So when considering smaller defects, just what is the evidence for it's implications, and what kind of data do we have on them? That's the question I'd ask before discarding them.
I don't see a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) Either it works or it doesn't, for improving offspring.
(2) Lots of people won't be able to afford embryo selection, so humans will continue to explore both options.
I don't see a problem.
Seems simple to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
This issue presented HERE is the ethics involved in picking and choosing which embryos to implant rather than choosing at random, which would most closely (as far as we know) mimic the random selection of an egg to release and a sperm to make it to the egg. Totally different issue, with totally different ramifications - like the evolutionary path of our species. (You could argue that legalizing abortion also affects our evolutionary path b/c certain populations are now less likely to give birth - but the fact is that abortions happen whether they're legal or not. Genetic engineering of this sort is likely to be extremely rare if illegal.)
Gay marriage won't be a problem in the future (Score:4, Interesting)
Mutant Super-power Disambiguation is my line (Score:5, Funny)
I have no problem with anyone who wants to sift through endless embryos until you find one that has the markers for mutant super-powers. After all, that's helping usher in the next stage of human evolution. Once you've discovered that, though, I don't think it's right to continue selecting based on the nature of those powers. Just let super-nature take its course. You should be proud just to have an X-Man running around your house, even if it is a crappy one like Dazzler.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"You want to know how I did it!? I never saved anything for the swim back."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)